Community Stories

filtered by "Tobacco Use"

Once the center of the state’s tobacco industry, people have come together in Durham County, North Carolina to tackle the county’s health problems from every angle. For decades, the county has struggled to overcome both racial and socioeconomic...

For county health officers, sometimes raising awareness isn’t enough. To make lasting change, focusing on programs and initiatives that are proven to be successful in implementation and enforcement will go a long way to making something stick. That’...

Despite what you might expect with the climate, any annual list of “most bikeable” cities is going to have Minneapolis, MN, near the top. As the county seat of Hennepin County, which ranked 52 out of 84 counties in Minnesota in the 2012 County Health Rankings , Minneapolis is intentionally designed with bikeways and paths to encourage active transportation, including biking and walking.

Nestled along the eastern shore of Mount Hope Bay in Bristol County, Fall River, MA, was a mill town for about 150 years. As recently as half a century ago, families who called it home knew the mills would provide steady employment. That changed when the economy changed, and many of the biggest mills closed down. Today about a quarter of residents live in poverty and the unemployment rate is around 9 percent.

What would you do if the county you’d lived in and loved for many decades was ranked the least healthy county in your state for three years running? What if just days after this year’s Rankings release Reuter News Service began investigating why your county has the highest rate of prescription drug deaths in a six county area? This is the situation faced by the people of Scott County, Indiana. It would be understandable if their response was to give up in frustration, but that’s far from the reality.

In an April 2011 Rankings in Action webinar , Kirk Smith, president and CEO of the Greater Flint Health Coalition (GFHC) commented that the 2011 County Health Rankings were "...a good tool to wake people up.” Ranked 78th out of 82 Michigan counties for health outcomes and last for health behaviors, Genesee County leaders appreciated the wake up call to create a County Health Rankings action plan.

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